The report, produced by the UK Centre for Tobacco Contol Studies, was compiled from a survey of 5,000 teenagers who were asked if they had seen 50 films randomly selected from 366 box-office hits between 2001 and 2005. When the viewing preferences of the adolescents were compared to their smoking habits it was found that those exposed to puff-heavy plotlines were 73% more likely to have tried a cigarette and nearly 50% more likely to take up smoking in the longer term.

"More than half the films shown in the UK that contain smoking are rated 15 or below, so children and young teenagers are clearly exposed," said Dr Andrea Waylen of the University of Bristol, who led the research group. "Our results confirm an association between this exposure and youth smoking in this country, indicating that raising the certification to 18 in the UK is likely to lower smoking rates among youth."

It's unlikely that the cinefile subsect of the UK's bike sheds will be troubled for a while however. "Glamorising smoking has been included as a classification issue in our published classification guidelines," said British Board of Film Classification director David Cooke. "There is, however, no public support for automatically classifying, for instance, a PG film at 18 just because it happens to contain a scene of smoking."

Multimedia

• Ohhhhh it gets dark! ... Andrea Arnold's gloomy re-imagining of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was one of the highlights of Xan Brooks' trip to the Venice film festival a few weeks ago. "It pushes the story all the way back to its original 1847 incarnation and then beyond, up-river, into primordial sludge," says Xan. "What comes back is a beautiful rough beast of a movie, a costume drama like no other". Watch our world exclusive trailer for the film (out in the UK on Novermber 11) here.

• ... It gets lonely. On the other side from you. In Glenn Ficarra's Crazy, Stupid, Love Steve Carrell plays Cal Weaver, a worn-out middle-ager who discovers his wife (Julianne Moore) is having an affair. Cal's not made for single life, so he calls on young, lean, bar crawler Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling) to help him rediscover his vitality. Carrell, Gosling, Moore and co-star Emma Stone spoke to Hadley Freeman about the film and explained why this rom-com was revamping the genre.

Other site highlights

• Peter Bradshaw took in all the sun and celluloid of the San Sebastián film festival this week. He came back tanned and treated to Martin Scorsese's George Harrison biopic, Living in the Material World, Julie Delpry's Skylab (a family drama set during the brief period when France thought a satellite was about to land on its head) and Hirokazu Kore-eda's I Wish, about two brothers growing up apart because of their parents' divorce.

• Meanwhile our Toronto film festival hangover continues. The festival's over, but we're still sweating out reviews. Any cure for that?

Coming up online tomorrow

• Ben Child will be back with seven days worth of nerdy nirvana in the Week in Geek; bloke-off-the-telly Danny Leigh will be taking a look at why films like Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times find it hard to capture history as it happens and Xan Brooks will be marking a big virtual circle around his What To Sees at this year's London film festival. We'll also have Xan's video review of Soul Surfer - a fact-based sob story in which a promising young surfer attempts to overcome the loss of an arm in a shark attack.

Coming up in the paper

• In Friday's Film & Music: Twitter and the odd pop at the American far right have kept Kevin Smith in backwards caps, but what happened to the rest of microbudget lot?, asks Ryan Gilbey; David Katz dips and swoons to the tune of The Story of Lover's Rock, a documentary on the British raggae offshoot; and Niall Griffiths talks about the strange sensation of seeing actors saying words that you done wrote as his book, Kelly + Victor is transposed to the big screen.

• Saturday's Guide's goes Gosling ga-ga as the Drive star tells Catherine Shoard what it's like accelerating up the road to supa-dupa-stardom, while Kevin Smith tells Alex Godfrey what it's like slowing down and pulling into the retirement lay-by. The Weekend Magazine has an interview with Gosling's Ides of March co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's fresh off directing duties on his debut, Jack Goes Boating, in which Hoffman also stars as a scientist given superpowers when he's bit- ... sorry ... as a schlubby taxi driver looking for love in New York City.

• Sunday's Observer New Review carries an interview with Helen Mirren, who plays as an ex-Mossad agent looking back on a difficult mission in The Debt, and director Paddy Considine, who's answering questions on his directorial debut, Tyrannosaur.

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